Wow.
The blog is called Windrose and is written by Pia Banzhaf. As she describes it:
My blog is a what I'd call a micro-blog with a very small number of readers interested particularly in Newfoundland and Canada. (thirty-ish, I'd say, on a regular day - your international readers would just add a tiny fraction to your regular ones, I would guess.)Now I speak German only if one considers being able to count to nine and grasp the basic German from Raiders of the lost Ark as having any ability at all in a foreign language. I picked up the word for rubber dummy - gummipuppen - from watching The longest day and that one stuck only because of the laughable reaction of the actors playing the Germans in the movie as they heard stories of rubber dummies that had been dropped to appear as though a massive drop of paratroops (fallschirmjaeger) had taken place behind the Normandy beaches on D-day.
There seems to be an infatuation with Canada in many people in Europe, but the news headlines are dominated by the big neighbour to the south, as you can imagine. So, I write a bit about my personal impressions of actually living here, about things I gather from the press about politics and so on. Often I contrast the way similar issues are being dealt with in Canada/Newfoundland and Germany or other European countries, like the immigration/environmental /health care issues. And of course, as you have seen, I love taking photographs, because I enjoy discovering the beauty of the lines, shapes and colours everywhere around us, although I am not as accomplished in photography as I would like to be.
When I answered Pia's original e-mail I mentioned something about her post in which she talked about the laundromat being out of order.
Turns out that had I googled geldautomat I would have seen in a couple of seconds she was talking about an instant-teller in one of her posts. Hopefully she got a good chuckle out of my ignorance...or pretentiousness.
One doesn't need to understand German, though, to appreciate Pia's artistic ability as a photographer. Her site is full of stunning photographs that show her love of, as she put it above, the beauty of lines, shape and colour.
So what brings a young German to Neufundland?
The usual story: The significant other got a hardly resistible offer for work. (Didn't work very well for me though, that's why you would find occasional sarcastic postings about Canadian immigration policy.)The shortcomings of our immigration policy to one side, we are obviously richer for Pia's presence.
Her blog can be found here and there is a new link in the Top o' the pile section.
Wilkommen, Pia.
